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“Have your current vehicle registration card, your driver license and a credit or debit card ready.” Well, no. You will have plenty of time to get all these things while listening to a rather unapologetic voice repeating “due to the increased number of calls, your waiting time may be longer than usual” over and over. Instead make yourself a cup of tea, get comfortable, and a have a copy of Kafka’s “The Castle” ready. Remember to switch the phone from right to left and back every so often while cautiously navigating the dangerous seas of menu options offered by the ever friendly robot. Resist the urge to press “2” for Spanish the third time around in the hope of at least getting some free vocab help. Never opt for “more questions”. Insist that “Speak to a technician” really is what you meant, even if the robot interprets it as “Vehicle Registration”. Then, once in line for the “technician”, start to think about where you might have placed all the important documents you’ll need. Make another cup of tea. And enjoy your Kafka.

Spam can work (or attempt to work) in a number of different ways. Recently there seems to be trend towards one-word subject-lines, for example: “leg”. The email content is not in any way related to the subject line. It seems clear that this works well for things people might actually be looking for, like “car” or “job”. But the words are quite obviously put in there at random.

Interestingly, though, they succeed in evoking images, stories, thoughts quite related to the products advertised indirectly. This is because you don’t just get one such email, but dozens in a row. So instead of being left with the unhelpful “leg”, you end up with, for example, this: